When I was a kid I used to hear that the best places to eat were
those where you saw trucks out front. Truck drivers supposedly
knew where to eat. It proved to be perfectly true, but only for
someone whose taste in food was no better than a truck driver's.
[-mrl]

Buzz Aldrin recently complained that the lack of interest in the
space program is much the fault of science fiction. Science
fiction, he says, has raised people's expectations with its
transporter devices and hyper-light travel. Real science, like
space exploration, is slower and more cautious.

I always thought that science fiction contributed greatly to
science. The truth is that science fiction has been both good and
bad for science.

Back when the film THE RIGHT STUFF came out it had the quote "No
bucks, no Buck Rogers." It meant that without proper funding there
would be no space program. I turned it around and said at my local
L5 Society meeting that largely there also was a case of "No Buck
Rogers, no bucks." One of the great factors promoting the space
program was that science fiction had captured people's imagination
and has made them want a space program. This is a curious dual to
what Aldrin said. Perhaps science fiction did falsely advertise
the drama of spaceflight. It is not clear that that was not what
was needed to get large numbers of people interested in science.
And of those who were interested in science, I doubt that there
were many who turned around and rejected careers in science because
it did not have any light-sabers.

This does not say that Aldrin does not have a point. The same
imaginative images may have raised people's expectations and the
reality has been disappointing. I can remember claims by people
that they were really looking forward to humans first setting foot
on the moon. They claimed that to there very great shock, NASA had
made the event dull. Science fiction has made people interested in
the space program, but it cannot keep them interested in the space
program. It is up to NASA to do that.

I remember talking to my guidance counselor, probably when I was in
seventh or eighth grade. She asked me what I was interested in. I
think that the first thing that came to mind was science fiction.
What else? Well, I like science. She nodded and said that that
accounts for my interest in science fiction. It was like she
thought my interest in science fiction was some kind of a
personality oddity that needed an explanation. I told her that it
was probably the other way around. I don't know why I qualified it
with the word "probably"" Science fiction certainly was the basis
of my interest in science. There was no "probably" about it.

I was interested in science fiction, or at least the tropes of
science fiction from about the age of five. The interest in
science came not long after, but after. Science fiction led the
way. When I took science courses somewhere hanging over them was
the image in my mind of space travel and that this was the way to
get to do that. I need hardly add that the images of space travel
looked a lot like the art of Chesley Bonestell. Without use of
anything like light-sabers I suspect Bonestell's science fiction
art was the inspiration of a lot of soon-to-be aerospace engineers.

I think my imagination accounted for the interest in science
fiction and the science fiction accounted for my interest in
science. I suppose from science fiction I personally was
interested to see how humanity actually did make it to the moon,
but I admit it was not as exciting as it was in DESTINATION MOON.
I wasn't so much disappointed as edified. Had there not been
science fiction I would not have been disappointed, but there
probably would not have been a space program to be disappointed in.

Back in the 1950s science and science fiction were in close
partnership. From 1952 to 1954 there was a classic series of
articles in Colliers Magazine looking at how it was thought that
space would be conquered. It especially covered the current
thinking of Wernher von Braun, but it was brought to life by the
space art of artists like Bonestell.

Is this magazine series science or science fiction? It was a bit
of both. Walt Disney soon picked up on the popularity of the
Colliers articles and he got many of the same people working on
three "Tomorrowland" episodes for his Disneyland TV show: "Man In
Space", "Man and the Moon", and "Mars And Beyond". (Each episode
was from one of the "lands" that were sections of Disneyland.
Though I watched faithfully I think these were the *only*
Tomorrowland episodes there ever were.)

Each of the three Tomorrowland episodes started with a
light-hearted but informative lecture on the history of man's
relationship with space or what the current thinking was in the
development of a space program. Each episode ended with a
dramatization of a mission going into space. Those little pieces
of science fiction were the frosting on the cake. The special
effects look a little hokey more than a half-century later and the
music can be over-dramatic, but I still find them exciting. As of
this writing they are up on YouTube.

Again, this was fact-based science fiction. The magazine and the
TV shows really excited my generation and reportedly the generation
that came before which included one John F. Kennedy who set a
national goal for the country of putting a man on the moon in the
1960s. Had there been no Buck Rogers there probably would have
been no bucks. The science helped to inspire the science fiction
and it brought in readers.

Overall science fiction likely has done as much for science as
science has done for science fiction. And I would say that it
certainly has done more good than harm. [-mrl]

CAPSULE: A rare but truly fine family film has finally made it to
DVD. A Flemish boy is held back from his dream of becoming an
artist by his extreme poverty. But then he makes two friends. He
finds a dog, beaten and abandoned, and adopts the dog even less
fortunate than him. But more important is the relationship he
forms with the artist in town who tries to teach the boy the
meaning of being an artist. The story has been adapted to silent
films and to Japanese anime, but a standout performance by Theodore
Bikel makes this the best of the three sound and live-action
adaptations. This film is a personal favorite of mine. Rating:
+3 (-4 to +4) or 9/10

One of the great double features of my youth was 20th Century Fox's
pairing of JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH with James B. Clark's
A DOG OF FLANDERS. I came away liking the co-feature as much as
the film I had gone to see. (Okay, almost as much, but I was a
*real* science fiction fan.) Over the years I have looked several
times to find it on video. It was available only on a rare VHS
tape. Finally it has been released to DVD, digitally re-mastered,
and I could not be more pleased.

So why would a film that outwardly looks like it is just a boy-and-
his-dog story set in Belgium be such a find? First of all, the dog
story is just a sub-plot. The film is more about the struggles of
an impoverished boy to dedicate his life to creating art. But
there is something more about it that is very unusual. It is
honest in a way that very few family films ever are. Life is very
hard for its main character and the film does not pull its punches.
This film is not sugarcoated. (Admittedly the ending is not as
grim as the ending of the book.) There are themes in this film of
cruelty, of loss, but also of love and of the redemptive power of
art. Does that sound like a lot to put into a single film, a
family film? It is there and it all works.

Nello Daas (played by David Ladd, son of Alan Ladd) lives with his
grandfather (Donald Crisp), the town milk deliveryman in a Belgian
town. Nello's one obsession is art. He is fascinated by the local
painter Piet van Gelder (played by the wonderful Theodore Bikel).
The boy has tried doing his own art using what little he has--
iodine and charcoal, which are far from ideal materials. Nello
knows that there is supposed to be a magnificent painting in the
local cathedral, a work of Peter Paul Rubens, but the painting is
behind a curtain and the cathedral charges a franc to see the
painting. Grandfather knows how unlikely it is that Nello could be
a successful artist and has planned a very different career for his
grandson. One day Nello and his grandfather find a dog that had
pulled a cart, but is now collapsed from overwork and mistreatment.
Nello adopts the dog in spite of the fact that he and his
grandfather barely have enough food to keep themselves alive. But
the heart of the film is in the relationship that Nello forms with
the self-doubting artist van Gelder.

This is a classic and one of the best family films every made. It
is moving and says a very great deal about life and about art.
Some major changes were made from the original story, but it does
not tell children that life is never hard. I rate the 1960 version
of A DOG OF FLANDERS a +3 on the -4 to +4 scale or 9/10.

Though never said, the town is really the City of Antwerp and the
cathedral is the Cathedral of Our Lady. The great Rubens painting
the boy wants to see is Rubens's The Elevation of the Cross:

The title dog, named in the film Patrasche, is played by Spike, who
also played the title role in OLD YELLER. The screenplay was
written by Ted Sherdeman who co-wrote the screenplay for another
famous animal film, THEM!

I've often thought about the time travel case a la H. Beam Piper's
"Time and Time Again", where the protagonist travels back into his
own body but at an earlier point of his life, but retains future
memories and knowledge.

It is acceptable in this story because he is essentially a single
man with no children, or "ties" to the future. If it happened to
me, I'd essentially be condemning my children to non-existence:
there would be little chance of ever recreating the exact
circumstances that led to their creation, I might not persuade
their (future) mother that I'm worth reproducing with, or a host of
other possibilities might turn me away from that path.

This realization might cripple me so emotionally ("I've killed my
kids!") that I couldn't choose to travel back before conception
of my youngest child, and this severely limits any gains the travel
might afford me.

Even thinking about it makes me almost cry :-) [-hmg]

Mark responds:

It is an interesting idea for time travel. It would explain why
we never get any time travelers in New Jersey. I never see one.
It could be they are all over the place, but since you never get a
new person out of this arrangement I am not seeing anyone new.
With Time Travel this way you never get to the far future, but you
are effectively immortal.

As for the problem, of course you could have other children.
Probably they would be children who are just as good as the ones
you have now. They wouldn't be the same, but you could be just as
close to them as you are which your current children. And your
current children would not die. They would just never have been
born. That is painless for them.

I think you have a problem getting hung up on specific individuals.
That makes everything more complicated. You might want to try a
sort of GROUNDHOG DAY approach. Just keep going back until by
chance you get a really good batch. Then you can stop trying.
After a few hundred, you would really get to know what to look for
so you would just have to spend a few years each batch of kids.
You can draft (and memorize) a list of acceptance criteria. After
the first hundred I am sure you would not make the mistake of
becoming too attached.

I guess there is some question of whether if you had the same body
you would get the same kids. But I suspect you would probably be
varying the timing and that would give you different children each
time.

THE AFFINITY BRIDGE by George Mann (ISBN-13 978-0-7653-2320-0,
ISBN-10 0-7653-2320-6) is a steampunk novel with airships and
mechanical automata, as well as a glowing blue policeman who has
apparently come back from the dead to avenge his murder. The
subtitle "A Newbury & Hobbes Investigation" tells you several
things. One, this follows in the great tradition of
detective/assistant mysteries. Two, neither Newbury or Hobbes is
likely to turn out to be the villain. And three, both will survive,
because there seems to be clear intention to make this a series if
this one is successful. And it is reasonably entertaining in a
steampunky, Victorian-detective sort of way.

However, Tor really needs a better proofreader. On page 98, we
read: "The device is designed to power itself. When the automaton
moves, a rotor inside its abdomen rocks back and forth, racheting
the winding mechanism and causing the mainspring in the chest to
become taut. Effectively, the unit is self-winding, and thus it
will never power down, unless commanded to do so. If left inactive
for long periods without instructions, the unit will eventually
move itself to trigger the winding mechanism." This may be an
alternate world, but they presumably have not repealed the Laws of
Thermodynamics. First, what Mann has described is a perpetual
motion machine, one in which no energy is lost while it is
operating (a violation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics). But
even assuming that worked, why would it then have to wind itself
when it was inactive for a while? That implies that energy is
leaking out somehow, but that it can recharge itself as a closed
system to restore that energy (a violation of the First Law of
Thermodynamics).

(It is true that the person who says this is not scrupulously
honest, but there is no revelation that he has lied in this
context.)

A YEAR WITHOUT MADE IN CHINA by Sara Bongiorni (ISBN-13
978-0-470-11613-5, ISBN-10 0-470-11613-7) is Bongiorni's
description of trying to go an entire year without buying anything
made in China. Her reasons seem a bit vague--she claims not to be
opposed to Chinese goods per se, and was willing accept them as
gifts. Indeed, at times she basically *asked* people to give her
children specific things that they wanted that were made in China.
And she spent a lot of time explaining to her children, and
friends, and us, that it was not that she disliked China, or that
China was bad. Also, her efforts were mostly at the end-product
level, because it became obvious that one could not always tell
where the parts for something were made (though she did try).
Bongiorni seems to vacillate between spending a lot more money to
avoid something made in China and conniving to get as a gift
something she (or more often, her son) wants that is made in China.
It is also not clear how much buy-in she had from her family on
this project that they were involved in. While there are
interesting anecdotes about trying to find children's shoes or
sunglasses, it mostly seems like an undirected experiment, sort of
like deciding not to buy anything made with plastic. (Or perhaps
even less directed than deciding not to buy anything made with
plastic.) [-ecl]

Mark Leeper
mleeper@optonline.net
Quote of the Week:
Life has to be given a meaning because of
the obvious fact that it has no meaning.
--Henry Miller